“A happy prosperous humanity enjoying their bodies, exercising the arts, patronizing the religions, may be well content to leave the machine, by which their desires are satisfied, in other and more efficient hands.”133
Since Bernal thinks that those who tend the machines will increasingly be machines themselves, we now see why he thinks the human race might split into two branches. Yet whereas it seems very likely, as he has suggested, that the distinction between machine-men and men would also be the distinction between ruler and ruled, perhaps that would not have to be the case. For as Bernal notes, science depends on the supportive routine work of non-scientists, and on the recruitment from the many of the few most capable minds. Furthermore, he claims, scientists themselves tend to have a strong identification with humanity. So the first stable aristocracy could be a meritocracy that might at least recruit (or should one say harvest?) fresh brains from the most promising of humans. Still, characteristics that might bind the two groups will likely diminish with time, allowing the underlying processes producing dimorphism to hold sway.134 At that point it is quite possible that “the old mechanism of extinction will come into play. The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them.”135 The main hope for a different outcome is once again the prospect that the more advanced beings will settle in space, leaving Earth to the old-fashioned model in “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.”136 So decades before today’s transhumanists, Bernal predicts the survival of humanity as a curiosity (at best).
Bernal is not certain his vision will prevail,137 nor does he hold that the developments he lays out will produce a perfect world:
the dangers to the whole structure of humanity and its successors will not decrease as their wisdom increases, because, knowing more and wanting more they will dare more, and in daring will risk their own destruction. But this daring, this experimentation, is really the essential quality of life.138
Bernal’s predictions are not so millennial as Fedorov’s, nor as overtly tragic as Reade’s. But they do contain tensions. He recognizes that his scientifically driven “progress of dehumanization” is motivated by an ultimately unfulfillable desire for the mysterious and supernatural.139 Those who push the boundaries of knowledge outward will create a world that, for them at least, will be ever more prosaic, and therefore of less interest. Even if this process is infinite, it retains a Sisyphean character, and one might wonder: why bother? It turns out, however, that this “daring” effort to transcend one’s time and control one’s life is nothing other than an expression of life itself that is beyond our control. There is a natural fatality to our effort to control nature.
FROM BETTER HUMANS TO BEYOND HUMANITY
My purpose in presenting these examples of thinkers who anticipated today’s transhumanism is not to suggest how these thinkers might have influenced one another, or to prove their influence on today’s transhumanists. But I trust it is reasonably clear that between Condorcet and Bernal the idea of progress itself has traveled quite a distance. Where for Condorcet the friend of humanity can find reason to think that in the world to come people will be more humane to each other, when Bernal looks to the future he sees “the progress of dehumanization”: human extinction at worst, and at best human irrelevance to the progressive development of intelligence and power over the natural world—an evolutionary “dead end.” As we will discuss later, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association and the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, thinks we can have it both ways, expressing the hope that our posthuman replacements will be designed to be more humane than we are. Everyone seems to agree that the kinder, gentler world that Condorcet imagines could indeed come into being; but for Haldane it would amount to a short-sighted squandering of nature’s potential, while for Bernal we humans would be likely to live in it as subjects to powers so far beyond our control as to make historical aristocracies seem models of egalitarianism. Today, David Pearce, another founder of the World Transhumanist Association, cuts through the problem of needing some to rule others in order to keep them happy by suggesting that we can redesign ourselves so that we are always experiencing “a sublime and all-pervasive happiness.”140 Condorcet’s expectation that people will be better fed becomes the revolt in Fedorov and Flammarion against the “absurd” need to eat at all, while today’s transhumanists likewise find it unacceptable that we eat and excrete as we do.141 Condorcet suggests the possibility of accelerating progress toward the conquest of nature here on Earth, but for Haldane and Bernal what is at stake is the aesthetic recreation of the universe itself. Today, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, the most widely known of the transhumanists, wonders if posthuman superintelligence might not be able to overcome entropy itself, thereby preventing the now-expected eventual end to the possibility of life in the universe and overcoming the last challenge to the immortality that Condorcet was only willing to hint at.
There is no single arc that connects all of our authors in such a way as to account for this significant transformation in the understanding of progress. But each lays part of the foundation for the change, a foundation on which is built the edifice that is contemporary transhumanism. Let us try to identify some of the key points.
The main line of Condorcet’s argument is the most familiar. Perhaps building off Rousseau’s notion of human “perfectibility,”142 Condorcet asserts that we possess a (unique?) “quality of melioration” that allows us to improve ourselves, primarily through the conquest of nature. As that project succeeds, many of the longstanding, seemingly given conditions of human life—poverty, hunger, disease, vice, and other pervasive disabilities that have stood in the way of a good human life—become problems that can be solved. By solving them, we make better human beings, human beings who are physically more fit, mentally more capable, morally improved. The rate of progress accelerates with this new starting point, but Condorcet seems to believe that people will remain human beings.
Yet Condorcet’s own ideas about life extension, combined with the possibility of accelerating progress, begin to suggest something more radical. Initially life extension seems of a piece with the other improvements he speaks of. After all, as we become healthier and eat better, longer life would seem to follow as a matter of course. One could say that Condorcet is merely pointing out how we can reduce the incidence of premature death. But when he starts talking about an indefinite extension of lifespan, the door is opened to the possibility of a significantly more fundamental change in the terms of human existence. It does not seem as if Condorcet wishes to open the door very wide. Yes, he looks forward to a time when death becomes something that is chosen, but note that it is chosen “in the course of nature,” as if there is in this respect at least some part of nature that human beings will not or should not master.143
This limit is one that our other authors are not nearly so inclined to respect, and their overt desire for immortality is of a piece with a far stronger inclination to imagine the development out of humanity of some completely new kind of superior being. Perhaps Condorcet did not understand, or chose not to highlight, the more radical consequences of his own picture of accelerating progress. But it seems more likely that something had to be added to Condorcet in order to promote this shift in the imagination. What might that be?
First, as Fedorov explicitly highlighted, there is the Malthusian dilemma of resource scarcity. Malthus wrote in direct response to Condorcet’s hopes for the future, arguing that the melioration Condorcet imagined would be self-defeating. More people living materially more comfortable lives will simply produce resource scarcity, which in turn will bring back all the ills of human life. Perpetual progress understood as an ongoing improvement in the material conditions of life for all is thus simply impossible since population will grow faster than available resources. For Fedorov, the conquest of space is in part a solution to the Malthusian dilemma of resource exhaustion, a solution that becomes the more plausible as the sense
